Monthly Archives: September 2009

We get a decent bit of Web traffic here on our site. I was looking at the browser and platform breakdowns and was surprised to see IE6 still in the lead! I’m not sure if these stats are representative of “the Internet in general” but I am willing to bet they are representative of enterprise-type users, and we get enough traffic that most statistical noise should be filtered out. I thought I’d share this; most of the browser market share research out there is more concerned with the IE vs Firefox (vs whoever) competition aspect and less about useful information like versions. Heck we had to do custom work to get the Firefox version numbers; our Web analytics vendor doesn’t even provide that. In the age of more Flash and Silverlight and other fancy schmancy browser tricks, disregarding what versions and capabilites your users run is probably a bad idea.

IE6 – 23.46%

IE7 – 21.37%

Firefox 3.5 – 17.28%

IE8 – 14.62%

Firefox 3 – 12.52%

Chrome – 4.38%

Opera 9 – 2.20%

Safari – 1.95%

Firefox 2 – 1.27%

Mozilla – 0.48%

It’s pretty interesting to see how many people are still using that old of a browser, probably the one their system came loaded with originally. On the Firefox users, you see the opposite trend – most are using the newest and it tails off from there, probably what people “expect” to see. The IE users start with the oldest and tail towards the newest! You’d think that more people’s IT departments would have mandated newer versions at least. I wish we could see what percentage of our users are hitting “from work” vs. “from home” to see if this data is showing a wide disparity between business and consumer browser tech mix.

Edit – maybe everyone but me knew this, but there’s a pretty cool “Market Share” site that lets people see in depth stats from a large body of data… Their browser and OS numbers validate ours pretty closely.